what uses 4/6 cores?

paradisiac · 31 Jan 2011 at 10:55

ok, had a bit of a play with my setup over the weekend and its now running happy at 3.6GHz. the 2 gaves i have played are NFS:HP and FIFA11, both (albeit with limited settings available) run fine with the settings maxed out at 1920x1080. my plan was to upgrade to a phenom x4 in the near future, but is it necessary? what games/apps actually require a quad core cpu to run smooth?

pcAnywhere · 31 Jan 2011 at 11:05

Necessary? Unlikely at the moment. Whilst there are a number of games that take advantage of multiple cores, most games remain GPU bound rather than CPU bound.

wakayoda · 31 Jan 2011 at 11:17

Crysis 2 will most likely make use of the extra cores, I would expect most pc exclusives this year to put more of the power to use effectivly.

paradisiac · 31 Jan 2011 at 11:17

so i would be better of saving the money for a second HD6850?

paradisiac · 31 Jan 2011 at 11:21

wakayoda said:
I would expect most pc exclusives this year to put more of the power to use effectivly.

what pc exclusives are due this year?

Buchanan0204 · 31 Jan 2011 at 11:34

If you put another 6850 in crossfire with your current one, your CPU is most definitely going to be a huge bottleneck on the system.

I would definitely get the phenom first. The 6950 is a great card, have you flashed it to the 6970 yet?

It's not all about the number of cores, there are many factors taken into account.

Have a look here at the comparison between your cpu and a phenom. Look at the games frames towards the bottom.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/121?vs=102

pcAnywhere · 31 Jan 2011 at 11:36

paradisiac said:
so i would be better of saving the money for a second HD6850?

I would never recommend a multi-GPU setup, way too dependent on driver support for my liking.

I'd save the money and wait to see what causes you problems in future.

paradisiac · 31 Jan 2011 at 11:45

ok, so best thing seems to be, leave as is, until i get an issue?
i was under the impression the 250 would cause a bottleneck and affect the performance in games, but the 2 i have tried have run fine. my concern is that the 2 i have tried are not very cpu intensive. are there any games (other than crysis and GTA IV) that will be impacted by the 250 that i could try?

JonJ678 · 31 Jan 2011 at 12:19

Anything will run on a single core if you're sufficiently patient.

If you're less patient, then 4+ threads start to look like a good idea.

paradisiac · 31 Jan 2011 at 12:44

JonJ678 said:
Anything will run on a single core if you're sufficiently patient.

If you're less patient, then 4+ threads start to look like a good idea.

but do applications and games actually utilise the extra cores? i know 4 cores will never be 4x faster than a single core, but would there really be a noticable difference?

Buchanan0204 · 31 Jan 2011 at 12:46

paradisiac said:
but do applications and games actually utilise the extra cores? i know 4 cores will never be 4x faster than a single core, but would there really be a noticable difference?

Yes

paradisiac · 31 Jan 2011 at 12:51

Buchanan0204 said:
Yes

ok, just i can hand on heart say, for the stuff i have used, i cannot see any difference between my 250 dual core clocked to 3.6GHz and my old i7 clocked to 4GHz, which is why i asked. i know benchmarks will show an increase, but in real world activities, i cannot honestly say there is a noticable difference.

kristmace · 31 Jan 2011 at 13:39

I recently upgraded from an Athlon X2 running at 2.4 to an i5 750 Quad Core running at 3.4. I must say that the extra cores don't seem to have made as much of a difference when you consider that this upgrade also includes faster ram, faster cache and a faster clock speed.
Maybe this is the reason that i5 Quad Cores generally bench higher than a Phenom X6.

paradisiac · 31 Jan 2011 at 13:44

yeh, i think tooo many people get hung up on benchmark scores and getting as high as possible, but dont actually consider real world performance. i dont mind upgrading to an X4 Phenom, but i want to be able to justify the £130+ spend. if its going to make my benchmarks get higher scores and my pc run same as it does now, then i might aswell spend the money on something else like better cooling and clocking the X2 more. but if i will notice a difference then its £130+ well spent.

Random Guy · 31 Jan 2011 at 14:37

Media encoding and zip/unzip of files scale well with more cores...

paradisiac · 31 Jan 2011 at 14:49

Random Guy said:
Media encoding and zip/unzip of files scale well with more cores...

that would make sense, my i7 did seem to convert files to dvd pretty quickly

but i dont really do a lot of that anymore. in terms of gaming, is there anything in the pipeline that would require me to upgrade to a phenom, that wouldnt also require me to upgrade my HD6850?

martynpd · 31 Jan 2011 at 14:56

winrar archiving

i archived 2 folders at once, 100% cpu load on all cores

JonJ678 · 31 Jan 2011 at 14:56

The problem with real world usage is that people do different things with their computers. If you spent time transcoding video or doing finite element analysis you'd feel very strongly that four cores are better than one. At present most of the code I'm working with is single threaded, because it's a bloody headache to get it to run on multiple cores.

It appears the answer to your op is that no software you use benefits from four or six cores. Ansys certainly does, GCC does, and matlab would do if I was better at writing in it.